Thursday, July 08, 2010

don't be able

Over at Language Log, Barbara Partee has produced an interesting coordination:
Many Americans don’t even know what the native languages of Belgians are, let alone be able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English.
Here she's coordinated the VP know what the native languages of Belgians are with the VP be able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English, but where you can say Americans don't know..., you can't say *Americans don't be. On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure, without a complete rewrite, how you would fix it. Perhaps, Many Americans are not even aware..., let alone able...

By the way, it appears that let alone as a conjunctive expression is overwhelmingly a North American phenomenon, and, it appears, one that continues to grow in popularity. Here's the graph from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).
In contrast, the British National Corpus has only a total of 7 relevant hits.

[addition: When I queried the construction in a comment, Barbara initially wrote that she had had no second thoughts about it, but then later wrote, "I did have an almost subliminal twinge as I tried to figure out what ending to put on 'be'."]
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2 comments:

  1. Randy Alexander7:36 PM

    Maybe: "Many Americans don't even...let alone have the ability to...."

    Nice find in COHA and BNC. I wonder how it occurred to you to look there. I would never have guessed that "let alone" is an Americanism.

    Good work!

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  2. Drew Ward11:45 AM

    "Many Americans don’t even know what the native languages of Belgians are, let alone be able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English."

    Be+able is a modal and has to be treated as a unit. You can mix modals of the same class together (in this case, modals of the form be+adjective which take their subordinate in infinitive form (+to). So, you could say "John is neither able nor allowed to go to the store" because both modals used (be+able and be+allowed -- equivalent in modality in this case to can and may) are of the same class. If they were in different classes though, it wouldn't work.

    For this original sentence:

    "Many Americans don’t even know what the native languages of Belgians are, let alone be able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English."

    The first clause is in the present tense, the aspect non-durational generalization, it's unperfected, and in the indicative mood (which is generally unmarked in English). Such sentences use do as the auxiliary carrying agreement for person, number, etc. Because this claus has do as its auxiliary, it can only carry that agreement through to the next clause if it also uses do (which could be omitted that second time).

    In the second clause however be+able occupies the verbal position held by do in the first. And then, within that modal, the auxiliary be carries agreement.

    So, in this case, the second clause requires that agreement be reestablished with that new auxiliary. Thus, the form should have been something like:

    Many Americans don’t even know what the native languages of Belgians are, let alone are they able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English.

    I would actually probably replace 'let along' with 'much less' or some such.

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